The door opened too easily.
That was the first wrong thing. He remembered it being heavy on his first visit, the old wood swollen in its frame, requiring a shoulder to shift it properly. Now it swung inward at a touch, the resistance gone, and the air that came out to meet him was cold and stale.
Lucius stepped inside.
The candles were all out. Every single one, the dozens of small flames that had lined the walls on his first visit, filling the shrine with warm unsteady light, all of them dead. The wax had run down the holders and pooled and set on the stone floor in pale frozen shapes.
He stood in the doorway and let his eyes adjust and looked at what was left of the shrine.
The shelves had been cleared, violently, their contents swept or thrown, the components and tools and small careful accumulations of an oracle's working life scattered across the floor in broken pieces.
